Note Firecracker does not work on AWS cloud instances, apart from bare metal instances.
Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing
91–100 of 107 posts
Re: Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the things you learn about multitasking is that in theory cooperative multitasking is the most efficient, but the least reliable. It’s cheaper (for the human) to use hard and fast rules that trade nasty surprises for vague disappointment. This sounds like a hybrid system. The intermediary is cooperative, the client code is oblivious. I’m curioue to see how this plays out over the long haul.
This runs Amazon lambda, so presumably well enough?
You don’t think 12 years from now we’ll be laughing about how lame Lambda is?
Coding practices change like the seasons. Every year is a little different, maybe a little better than the last, some things feel brand new, but the general patterns hold.
Re: Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon uses it mainly for Fargate and Lambda (from what I've read). Docker is a container technology (shared kernel), while Firecracker is an actual VM manager so it provides better isolation. It is more comparable with QEMU.
I would love to see a high level overview and compare/contrast between different container and virtualization technologies out there. For those if us who have a good understanding of operating systems and hardware, but haven't been keeping up with the plethora of new technologies that are out there. From what I understand, even QEMU can work in different modes, either emulating hardware or a system call interface. So…
QEMU cannot emulate a system call interface with KVM, only with just-in-time compilation. In hardware emulation mode however it can provide multiple hardware models, including one that is rather similar to Firecracker.
Re: Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's nice to have ptrace once in a while.
The only time I can think of where copious logging wasn’t good enough for “remote debugging” is when I was writing C code trying to figure out why I was killing the call stack or overwriting memory.
Having metrics and logging is a requirement to find out that there is a problem, but it doesn't help much to find out what the problem is.
Re: Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing
#95Would it not be better to make docker vm aware? The tooling would not have to radically change.
Re: Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only time I can think of where copious logging wasn’t good enough for “remote debugging” is when I was writing C code trying to figure out why I was killing the call stack or overwriting memory.
Having metrics and logging is a requirement to find out that there is a problem, but it doesn't help much to find out what the problem is .
It depends on the granularity of logging. What can local debugging tell you that copious logging at the “debug” level can’t?
Re: Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing
#97My skills are more on the developer side, this seems more like a devops tool, right?
As such, I'm never really sure if this is something worth playing with. I've played with docker and k8s, and generally understand how those tools help me, but I'm unsure about how firecracker would help unless I'm building a PaaS like fly.io.
It would be really cool if someone wrote a blog post which compared running a service on the different comparable options. Developers have the Todo apps written in dozens of frameworks to compare against. Is a similar type of exploration not feasible here?
Re: Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing
#98Firecracker is great We use it to run fleets of fast booting vms at https://fly.io . It’s really the best OSS to come out of Amazon.
Even after reading the comments and looking through the site I'm still not sure what fly.io is from a developer perspective. Is it a drop in replacement for heroku? How different is it from cloud run or cloud functions?
Re: Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing
#99Firecracker is great We use it to run fleets of fast booting vms at https://fly.io . It’s really the best OSS to come out of Amazon.
Even after reading the comments and looking through the site I'm still not sure what fly.io is from a developer perspective. Is it a drop in replacement for heroku? How different is it from cloud run or cloud functions?
It's closest to Cloud Run. We run your containers and scale across regions to minimize your users' latency.
You can't quite use it as a drop in replacement for Heroku since we don't have a Postgres offering. You can use fly to replace the web dynos in a Heroku app for faster performance, though.
Re: Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even after reading the comments and looking through the site I'm still not sure what fly.io is from a developer perspective. Is it a drop in replacement for heroku? How different is it from cloud run or cloud functions?
It's closest to Cloud Run. We run your containers and scale across regions to minimize your users' latency. You can't quite use it as a drop in replacement for Heroku since we don't have a Postgres offering. You can use fly to replace the web dynos in a Heroku app for faster performance, though.
Thanks for clarifying! Does it scale down to zero? If I have a very small hobby app that may only have a few users a day would it make sense to throw it on to fly.io?